This relates generally to electronic devices, and more particularly, to electronic devices with displays.
Electronic devices often include displays. For example, cellular telephones and portable computers often include displays for presenting information to a user. An electronic device may have a housing such as a housing formed from plastic or metal. Components for the electronic device such as display components may be mounted in the housing.
It can be challenging to incorporate a display into the housing of an electronic device. Size and weight are often important considerations in designing electronic devices. If care is not taken, displays may be bulky or may be surrounded by overly large borders. The housing of an electronic device can be adjusted to accommodate a bulky display with large borders, but this can lead to undesirable enlargement of the size and weight of the housing and unappealing device aesthetics.
Conventionally, assembled flat panel displays include a display panel, additional circuit elements, and a variety of peripheral circuitry configured to drive the display panel. The additional circuit elements may comprise gate drivers, emission (source) drivers, power (VDD) routing, electrostatic discharge (ESD) circuitry, demux circuits, data signal lines, cathode contacts, and other functional elements. The peripheral circuitry may also have integrated circuits providing various driver functions (driver chips) bonded to the display panel in this region. The peripheral circuitry may populate a significant portion of the display panel in active matrix displays, and may further populate areas proximate the display panel and coplanar with the display panel such that an overall surface area of an assembled display is significantly larger than the display panel itself.
Accordingly, manufacturers include border housings disposed to cover and obscure peripheral circuitry and other non-active display areas from end users in the assembled displays, resulting in increases in size and weight. Some manufacturers employ display border reduction techniques in an attempt to reduce relative size of border housings and in order to enhance an overall aesthetic of assembled displays.
However, display border reduction techniques, including high density peripheral circuitry, power routing, and other technologies currently still require relatively large border housings to entirely obscure peripheral circuitry and other non-active display areas.
Flexible display technologies offer alternative reduction techniques, including permanent bending of outlying display areas to reduce planar surface area as seen from a vantage point in front of an assembled display, while still allowing for arrangement of peripheral circuitry proximate associated display panel areas. However, if care is not taken, permanent bends in flexible displays may result in reduced reliability or component failure, increases in resistivity in outlying electrode connections, and other drawbacks including a minimum radius of curvature too large to garner any significant benefit in display border reductions.
It would therefore be desirable to be able to provide improved displays for electronic devices.